5,497 research outputs found
Information and Design: Book Symposium on Luciano Floridi’s The Logic of Information
Purpose – To review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS).
Design/methodology/approach – Nine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions.
Findings – Floridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects.
Research implications – Floridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS.
Originality/value – The book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas
The Epistemology and Ethics of Media Markets in the Age of Information
The paper will seek to demonstrate that information as communication has a dual inherent normative structure that commits its disseminators, especially the media, offline and online, to epistemological and ethical principles that are universally mandatory. With regard to the dissemination of information by the media, its business intelligence constituted by its commercial interests as a media market must always be congruent with moral intelligence on the basis of the epistemological and ethical universal principles that the dual normative structure of information gives rise and to which the media itself is committed. When the media?s business intelligence comes into conflict with moral intelligence, the latter must always take precedent over the former. Moreover, the communication of information to the public by the media, offline and online, even if conceived merely as another market commodity, commits the media to ethical conduct regardless of any other commercial interests that may come into conflict with the media?s ethical commitments to the public
Crisis Informatics: Perspectives of Trust – Is Social Media a Mixed Blessing?
This paper highlights one of the key concerns in the emerging area of crisis informatics: issues of trusted information in crises/disasters and how the unregulated nature of social media affects information creation and dissemination. Deciding which information providers to trust and what sources of information to trust in crises is critical as acting upon trusted information can shape and influence the nature of the crisis. Social media is a powerful tool for sharing information during crises and can be used to improve emergency management capabilities, however, it has the power to misinform and to hinder response efforts
The information effect: Constructive memory, testimony, and epistemic luck
Cataloged from PDF version of article.The incorporation of post-event testimonial information into an agent’s
memory representation of the event via constructive memory processes gives rise to
the misinformation effect, in which the incorporation of inaccurate testimonial information
results in the formation of a false memory belief. While psychological research
has focussed primarily on the incorporation of inaccurate information, the incorporation
of accurate information raises a particularly interesting epistemological question:
do the resulting memory beliefs qualify as knowledge? It is intuitively plausible that
they do not, for they appear to be only luckily true. I argue, however, that, despite
its intuitive plausibility, this view is mistaken: once we adopt an adequate (modal)
conception of epistemic luck and an adequate (adaptive) general approach to memory,
it becomes clear that memory beliefs resulting from the incorporation of accurate
testimonial information are not in general luckily true. I conclude by sketching some
implications of this argument for the psychology of memory, suggesting that the misinformation
effect would better be investigated in the context of a broader “information
effect”
A Bayesian social platform for inclusive and evidence-based decision making
Against the backdrop of a social media reckoning, this paper seeks to
demonstrate the potential of social tools to build virtuous behaviours online.
We must assume that human behaviour is flawed, the truth can be elusive, and as
communities we must commit to mechanisms to encourage virtuous social digital
behaviours. Societies that use social platforms should be inclusive, responsive
to evidence, limit punitive actions and allow productive discord and respectful
disagreement. Social media success, we argue, is in the hypothesis. Documents
are valuable to the degree that they are evidence in service of, or to
challenge an idea for a purpose. We outline how a Bayesian social platform can
facilitate virtuous behaviours to build evidence-based collective rationality.
The chapter outlines the epistemic architecture of the platform's algorithms
and user interface in conjunction with explicit community management to ensure
psychological safety. The BetterBeliefs platform rewards users who demonstrate
epistemically virtuous behaviours and exports evidence-based propositions for
decision-making. A Bayesian social network can make virtuous ideas powerful.Comment: 38 pages, 3 tables, 13 figures submitted for peer review for
inclusion in M. Alfano, C. Klein and J de Ridder (Eds.) Social Virtue
Epistemology. Routledge [forthcoming
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